1974 International Mime Festival La Crosse the mighty Mississippi -- Europe, Asia, and the Communist Bloc

SLC Mime Troupe -- Meeting the World

Summary: The Salt Lake Mime Troupe took over the carriage house of the McCune Mansion on Capitol Hill as 1973 became 1974. We also took on a new professionalism, or at least tried. I assisted Katie with her classes at University Utah by videotaping her and her students. She and Patsy Droubay also taught workshops at the Hillside Studio, our name for the carriage house, since the front door was on Hillside Avenue. Daniel Robert, our friend and manager from New York, took a couple of bold steps on our behalf -- he booked us at the Sun Tavern, one of the first openly gay discos in Salt Lake, or the Western USA. Everyone who went there wanted something out of the ordi-nary, and they loved our show! We first worked out of state in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in the spring, and Daniel then decided to send Matthew Child, Katie, Dave Carrillo, and Patsy Droubay to La Crosse, Wisconsin for the International Mime Festival and Institute.

Left to Right: Matthew Child, David Carrillo, Katie Apenzeller, and Patsy Droubay posing outside the McCune mansion's carriage house off Hillside Avenue.

Photograph by Daniel Robert's friend Pete.

24

During one of Katie's movement workshops in May, a Kindergarten teacher named George Kugler from Seattle, Washington showed up after reading one of our brochures. He was a tall, strong, bearded man with a gentle disposition and a fierce eagerness to learn. He enjoyed Katie's classes so much that when he read about about the Interna-tional Mime Festival he registered by mail and took off for the Midwest, where we saw him later. I made one of the most important personal decisions of my life when I gave up my industrial job to follow our dancers to La Crosse along with our new band. As men-tioned previously, Paul Blackwell and Stuart Curtis joined forces with a hard-rocking drummer named Fred and a proficient bass player named Bud. They enjoyed mixing up time-signatures, and our dancers enjoyed the new rhythms, our customers in the bars liked their music LOUD, and our band delivered the high-decibel goods. The International Mime Festival was a total trip -- we drove my red Volkswagen over the Wasatch Mountains into Wyoming. We then roared on in the night through Ne-braska, and Iowa while the Northern Lights glimmered in the northern sky on our left. After a short sleep-over in an Iowa field, we drove among the islands of the upper Mis-sissippi in the Wisconsin Dells until we descended from the high bridge into La Crosse and located Viterbo College, the host of the event. We asked around and found Matt, Katy, Patsy, and David at a lecture-demonstration featuring Dimitri the famous Swiss clown, moderated by Bari Rolfe. Dimitri had been scheduled to leave later that week, but remained throughout the whole festival because of the exciting energy there. He even performed a second show later on because so many people wanted to see him perform again. He communicated quite well in English and his wife was along to help him out, but he had no trouble talking with anybody. In person he was bright, open, friendly, and flashed the widest smile in the entire world. The dancers made room for us in the dormitory, and the rest of the first day was a blur of getting acquainted with the other participants, and sleeping off the weariness of a thousand-mile dash in my rather small Volkswagen. It didn't take too long to discover that La Crosse was the home of the Heileman Breweries and that there were more bars and liquor stores than any other type of business in that little town. A particularly large club on Main Street featured live music every night, and I found myself down there the next evening dancing with a proper, sophisticated Japanese lady named Mamako Yoneyama, who had a reputation as an Eastern Goddess among Mime professionals. She enjoyed hearing everybody's stories about where we came from, and our dreams and goals. If you didn't fall in love with Mamako just a little, then you never met her. She made friends with everyone she met. When we all crowded into the main theater to see her, Mamako began her stage performance singing a nightclub song in English, then continued on to quietly satirize oxygen masks, Tokyo, the modern sub-way, and finally spun an epic pantomime fairy tale in her long solo dance. Another friendly individual named Antonin Hodek was from Czeckoslovakia. He walked right up to me when I was packing a camera, and told me of photos he had shot on his journey between Los Angeles and LaCrosse. Two of them were significant to me as well -- a wild white horse in Wyoming, and an angelic beam of light from the clouds over Salt Lake City. The next significant episode I remember was a showing of Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) in the main theater. Jean-Louis Barrault was outstanding as Jean Baptiste Deburau, the man who turned Pierrot from an obscure white faced Commedia Dell 'Arte character into a popular icon during the 19th Century ...

25

26

31

Primary Documents from 1974

Captions for sundry and various images from my sketch book:

Plate One: Bari Rolfe's class -- Masks were always a fun way of overcoming inhibi-tions; The "Neutral Mask" revealed your body's attitudes when you wore it; This curly-haired gentleman was one of our dorm mates; Joan Merwyn was from San Francisco, and already knew performers like Noel Parenti, Lorene Yarnell, Bobby Shields, and James Donlon; Joan's room mate Nancy also hailed from San Francisco. She possessed an all-encompassing positive energy which never failed to inspire all of the others who came to learn. (Page 26)

Plate Two: Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli were always teaching, indoors and out of doors. The constant juggling sessions attracted many spectators at first, but everyone participated at last. (Page 27)

Plate Three: I could have behaved myself a lot better during the performance of fellow American Noel Parenti, but I laughed, and laughed hard, despite his unusual ideas and powerful technique. I knew Paul McCarthy, one of Conceptual Art's leading practitio-ners, but that was no excuse. Noel was a great tap dancer, and an even better man, who forgave me for my rudeness, accepting me as a friend. He enjoyed partying, and it was fabulous hearing stories from him, plus joining-in his physically excruciating early-morning warm-ups; Carlo Mazzone-Clementi; James Donlon was relatively progres-sive, an inspiration to our choreographer Katie. (Page 28)

Plate Four: Stan (Jango) Edwards anchored an international amalgamation of talented performers called the Friends Roadshow. Keyboardist Davy Norket led the Friends' Band. Few bass players could underpin his funky left hand, so they often toured without one. Young Justin Hammer was Jango's fearless partner in a variety of routines. Justin's mother Karen Harvey sang in Sail-Joya, a fine Amsterdam pop group; Roxanne Kelly sang the show-stopping Taste Me in the Friends' revue; Rehearsing Rockin' Robin with Carl Holmer, Ted Van Zutphen, Mike Lynch, and Rick Parets. Backed by a funky jazz band, Friends Roadshow wove visual clowning, stand-up comedy, high and low art to-gether into a colorful warp of theatrics. (Page 29)

Plate Five: Han Arai from Tokyo roomed with martial artist Shozo Sato. "We do a NEW Kabuki," he said proudly. David Carrillo signed on to the SLC Mime Troupe after serving in the US Navy. Hovey Burgess taught at NYU and at Ringling Brothers' train-ing facility in Florida. Nancy returned to San Francisco, eventually helping to lead the progressive Burning Man movement and internationally famous festival, which draws tens of thousands of artists annually. (Page 30)

Plate Six: George Kugler -- drawn while he was launching and catching Ping Pong balls with his mouth in the busy garden outside of the Viterbo College dormitories. With or without masks, Patsy Droubay always expressed her emotions very well in movement, and Carrillo partnered well with her onstage. (Page 31)

32

The absent Marcel Marceau owed much to Deburau, Barrault, and Charlie Chaplin for his famous silent character Bip. The movie also featured Etienne DeCroux, Marceau's equally-renowned teacher, as the blustering patriarch Anselme Deburau. The crowd was very upset when it looked like Baptiste's big onstage break was inter-rupted. We raised a noisy un-mime-like fuss until the projectionist came down front and told us the film was simply cut that way. We later saw some other films which relied on action rather than words, but the most memorable was a black and white short by Etienne DeCroux which I'll describe as a hard-edged modern dance with masks on a checkered stage. A circus trainer from New York University named Hovey Burgess was on hand, along with his wife Judy Finelli. He carried duffel bags full of rings, sticks, and heavier balls with which he was able to teach the rudiments of juggling to dozens of people at a time. One of the first sights I beheld from my dorm window was a statuesque dark-haired lady in the garden practicing the 'Cascade' pattern. Her name was Nancy and she'd obvi-ously had some training, plus knew how to teach. She regularly helped out neophytes like myself in the cool mornings before classes began. Before long, groups of people were everywhere on campus -- juggling some damn thing or combinations thereof. Hovey was often to be found lurking around these clusters, usually passing clubs with Judy as his partner. After only a year of learning to be a theater technician, the idea of physically perform-ing myself was still strange. The aesthetic atmosphere was impossible to resist though, and I participated at first by doing the kind of art I had already trained to do. I'd left my video gear behind, and photography was as new a thing as theater to me. I took out my sketch pad and went to work -- learning by drawing. The very first class I attended, as a sketching spectator, was one of Burgess' basic workshops, where he demontrated how patterns of balls led to rings, and rings led to sticks, which led to clubs, and how two led to three, or two led to four, or five, and -- well he ended the demonstration juggling battle-axes while balancing on a stack of crossed steel cylinders. LaCrosse balls, preferred by jugglers, were not available in La-Crosse, but Hovey somehow bought his battle-axes there. Later that week, we all took a trip en masse to Baraboo, Wisconsin, once the winter quarters for the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Dimitri was there, as were Czech expatriates Pavel and Citor. The circus graphics and memorabilia were fun to see, but the tired clowning under their big top was getting to be a drag until some young inmates from the Mime Festival started getting into the act. The cynical ol' carny in center ring even showed some life before we were done. After a short time, it became clear that the hapless festival management was outnum-bered and overwhelmed by the professional and carnal desires of more than a hundred men and women in their twenties. Across the street from the main theater was a place named the Wonder Bar, where beer sold for ten cents a glass. Help Me Rhonda and Chuck Berry's rather lewd full-length single of Reelin' & Rockin' were on the jukebox. After dark, the REAL festival convened THERE. The attendees quickly noticed that the European acts outclassed the Americans every time, and that "Mime" was much more than aping Marceau's famous moves -- it was an ancient synonym for "Theater," with the same objectives: Strength, skill, surprise, and artistic insight were all-important keys to an audience's appreciation. European artists like Citor Turba and Mummenschanz followed Dimitri's lead in shat-tering everybody's preconceptions, and lifting the proverbial bar of achievement high above the heads of even skillful Americans ...

33